Evidence, at last?

So Ran Hassin and colleagues have provided evidence that complex linguistic and arithmetical operations can be performed unconsciously (17 November, p 14). What is striking is that this was the founding insight of the cognitive revolution decades ago.

For example, in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, US linguist Noam Chomsky argued for the existence of unconscious rule-following in the construction of sentences. These are not the familiar rules from grammar lessons, but surprising rules involving, for example, transformations and derivational steps. Chomsky has also argued that mathematical ability is an application of this unconscious computational system.

The recent experimental results are valuable, but they hardly presage a sea change. If anything, they may serve to defend traditional cognitive science from some of its critics.

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist